By Bruce Melzer

One of the biggest changes we made with the launch of the new NPR.org was offering free transcripts on the site. Ever since NPR started transcribing its radio programs in 1990, we have been selling transcripts to help defray the costs of producing them. In the old days, we used to mail out copies of the transcripts, a time-consuming and expensive process for all involved. In 2002 we added e-commerce to the transcript operation and were able to drop the prices and deliver the transcripts via email.

Why did we give up this revenue stream? First and foremost, the users expect to be able to come to our site and read the story they heard on the air. As rich as the radio stories are, reading is faster than listening, our users told us. Although we were writing Web versions of many radio stories, a number of stories still didn't have much text. Making transcripts free solved that.

A second reason is accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Although NPR has always had a policy of providing free transcripts to these users, we eliminated the need for them to contact us for transcript copies.

There are solid business reasons for making transcripts free. Sales have been dropping over the years. As people search for, discover and share content, offering free transcripts will boost the traffic to NPR.org, traffic that can be monetized with sponsorship. Finally, search engines like text. Many of our stories could not be found by the search engines because they did not have enough text. Now it will be easier for the search engines -- and ultimately the users -- to find and enjoy NPR's stories.

By Daniel Jacobson

Last week, at the request of Rob Bole, I gave a presentation on NPR's API to the staff of CPB. This presentation was the first in a series that Rob is hosting to expose the staff of the CPB to the rapidly changing technology advancements in the digital media space.

This presentation is largely similar to the presentation I prepared for OSCON, with a few differences. The OSCON presentation focuses more on the technology of the API and digs a little more into the usage from a technical perspective. In the CPB presentation, on the other hand, I spent more time explaining what API's are, why they are useful, and the particular reasons why NPR built the ones that we have. Both presentations share a lot of the more interesting uses of the API across the four major target audiences: NPR, stations, partners and the public.

So, here is the full CPB presentation.

Click here to view the presentation (requires Adobe Acrobat)

By Demian Perry

The next version of our NPR News iPhone app will include audio scrubbing and a pause button. (Calvin Carter / Bottle Rocket)

I mentioned in my last post that the design of the NPR News app was based largely on ideas and suggestions from a panel of NPR listeners and heavy iPhone users. Immediately after launch, NPR ended the project precisely where it had begun: in consumer research.

Through structured interviews and hours of videotaped close-ups of people playing with the NPR News app, we discovered several ways to improve the app. Because we failed to provide users with the ability to pause and skip ahead within an audio piece, our early testers were occasionally frustrated by the listening experience. We also learned that the distinction between news you read and news you listen to, once so clear to us, was lost on users. Our listeners also helped us see that the playlist, while intuitive, was hard to manage for certain tasks.

In the hours that followed our release, we continued to track and learn from the comments in the app store and in our twitter feed. A couple of users discovered an error in the way some articles display, and we heard, time and again, of the need for better audio controls.

Scott Stroud, in our user experience group, assembled the comments into a list of recommendations for our next version of the app. Some of the improvements, such as a more intuitive playlist interface, will take a major code rewrite that may not be available until later this fall.

But our listeners also helped us to see a few ideas for improving the app that would be relatively easy to implement. Here, then, are the features slated for release within the next few weeks:

• Pause button - While listening to a piece, users will be able to pause playback and return to the audio later, exactly where they left off.
  
• Audio Scrubbing - Also while listening, users will soon be able to skip ahead to a particular place in an audio file.
  
• Sharing - Want to share NPR stories with your friends? We're adding support for Facebook and Twitter, as well as a way to send stories via the iPhone's native email application.

Listener comments from the iPhone app release will also help us to improve the design of the other apps we have in development. Michael Frederick, a developer at Google who is leading our Android project, has created an intuitive player experience that seems to be in line with user comments and with the recommendations from our user experience group.

The Symbian Foundation has also listened intently to the comments and recommendations from NPR listeners, and they're focusing the bulk of the effort for their upcoming NPR app on creating a fully-featured audio player.

As you're making your own list of improvements, please share them with us. We really appreciate those five star reviews, but we also appreciate your suggestions for improvement, because they help us know where to focus our efforts.

Early pencil sketch of the NPR News iPhone app. (Calvin Carter / Bottle Rocket)

By Demian Perry

What I love most about our new NPR News iPhone app is the way the design combines the plentiful content choices of the Internet with the effortless functionality of an old transistor radio. But while the app's interface is simple, its creation was complex, involving dozens of contributors, from designers and developers to business strategists and communication specialists, all working together for more than half a year. That process began early in 2009, with our search for a development partner who was familiar with the usability practices of the iPhone operating system.

Developer selection

After collecting recommendations from our contacts at Apple and at various digital media organizations across the country, we assembled a list of candidates and conducted interviews. We were looking for a developer who would listen to our needs and challenge our opinions. We found a good fit with Bottle Rocket, a Dallas-based app specialist with 10 apps under its belt and substantial audio experience. What we liked most about Bottle Rocket was that its CEO, Calvin Carter, listened carefully to our project plan, made notes, and patiently convinced us that everything we thought we knew about the iPhone was wrong. Most important, Calvin emphasized that the optimal user experience would be a fusion of the signature appearance and functionality of NPR.org and the standard functionality of the iPhone.

Editorial proposition

In our early brainstorming sessions, we defined the 'editorial proposition' of the app. We asked two important questions:

• What would regular NPR listeners expect us to create?
• How could we use the iPhone to distribute our content to new audiences?

Our research department assembled a group of loyal NPR listeners and heavy iPhone users to help us answer these questions. It was clear that our most loyal listeners expected us to stay close to our roots in audio journalism and create a passive listening experience that was as simple as switching on the radio. But it was also clear from our user interviews that there was a new kind of media consumer on the horizon, one who expected 24/7 coverage, time-shifted broadcast content, and the ability to actively customize a news browsing experience. In this group, we found omnivorous news junkies who regularly consumed newspapers, television, internet and radio, often at the same time.

Continue reading "The Making of the NPR News iPhone App" >

By Kinsey Wilson and Dick Meyer

For those who like to get their NPR information on the go, we're pleased to announce the launch of the NPR News iPhone app. It's designed to let you tune in your favorite stations, catch up on programs you missed or simply stay abreast of the latest news.

It's fast and efficient. And, like the redesigned Web site, designed to deliver news and programming to standards NPR listeners and readers have come to expect -- with integrity, consistency and occasional wit.

Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday, gives you a visual preview here:

As Scott explains, you can browse headlines and read the latest news stories. You can listen to programs live from practically any NPR station in the country -- or time-shifted to suit your own schedule. You can bookmark your favorite stations. And you can queue up programs to a play list, so you can listen later at your own convenience.

It's all part of our effort to make sure you can enjoy NPR, day or night, on whatever platform you use -- at your desk, in the car, on the subway, or strolling around the city.

The iPhone app is just the first of several smart-phone apps we'll be launching this year. And it supplements the access you already enjoy on our mobile Web site.

To download the free app, go to iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews or search for "NPR News" in the iTunes App Store. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Respectfully,

Kinsey Wilson, SVP & GM, NPR Digital Media
Dick Meyer, Executive Editor, NPR News

By Matt Gallivan

As senior research analyst in NPR's Audience Insight & Research (AIR) department, I wanted to share a bit about the role that research played in the recent redesign of NPR.org. I want to do this because we feel it's important to share exactly how the perspectives and needs of our radio listeners and web visitors were incorporated into the new site design.

The process began over a year ago when the AIR team conducted an audit of all pre-existing research on NPR.org and its users. Web metrics, competitive site data from third party research vendors, survey responses, focus group and ethnographic research findings were all incorporated into an overview of who NPR.org users are, what they liked and disliked about the previous NPR.org and what, in light of all this, our goals should be for the redesign.

It was in all of that pre-existing data that we observed NPR.org acting mostly as a complement to the NPR listening experience on the radio. Users told us that, generally speaking, they came to the site to follow up on a piece they heard on their way to work, to hear more or to share something with a friend. NPR.org was not frequently top-of-mind when it came time to check the latest news or explore a new topic online. While finding something you heard on the radio is a critical function of NPR.org that we knew we had to maintain if not improve, the general perception of the site as simply a companion to the radio was something we wanted to change.

Continue reading "The Role of Research in the NPR.org Redesign" >

By Harold Neal

One of the great aspects of NPR.org is our deep archive of free content. For example, you can browse our News topic archives back through 2004. (We have stories back through the mid 1990's, but the older stories are not classified into topics.) In the new site, we made a subtle but important change in how you can navigate these archives.

Previously, our archives used what might be called "search results" style navigation:

The first page of the archive displayed the next most recent 15 stories (after those appearing on the topic home page), and there was a set of numbers at the top and bottom of the page from 1 to 10 that allowed you to navigate further back. The number 2 took you to the next page of older results (results 30-45), the number 3 took you to the third page (results 46-60) and so on. For deep archives with hundreds of stories, there were special arrows that would let you navigate to pages 11-20, 21-30, etc. of the archive. If you've used any search engine, you will be familiar with this style of results. However, for an archive like ours, the date the content appeared is very important. Suppose you were interested in Politics stories about the 2006 midterm elections. The search results style navigation makes it difficult to find the stories you are interested in. You had to either try to guess which page of results corresponds to 2006, or you had to move backwards one page at a time until you found the stories you wanted.

On the new NPR.org site, we emphasize organization of the archives by date. All of the archive pages have a handy calendar in the right column that lets you jump to the time period of your choosing. From there you can still page around using the "New Stories" and "Older Stories" link if you don't know the exact date of the story you are looking for.

A second advantage of date-based archives is that when you bookmark an archive page, it will have the same set of stories when you come back to it later. With the old search results style navigation, new stories were continually being added to the top of the archives, pushing everything before them deeper into the results pages. So with search results style navigation, when you came back to the bookmark a few days later, it contained a completely different set of stories.

Technical Design

Our old archive pages pulled results using complex queries against our main Oracle database. Each new type of archive required its own specialized query, which made the code harder to maintain. The new archive pages run directly off of the NPR API. The API is well-suited to finding lists of stories by dates and by topics and other criteria. The API uses a MySQL database with a schema that is optimized to do these sorts of queries, and the query remains the same whether you are looking at topic archives, column archives, reporter archives, or any other type of archive on our site. By using the API, we get the advantage of the optimized schema plus the data caching built into the API. In pre-release testing, we found that the new archive pages are about 80 percent faster than the old archive pages. Finally, since the API has the logic built into it, we don't have to maintain distinct code to manage the way the results are returned.

By Daniel Jacobson and Adam Martin

It has been more than a year since NPR released our API and formally announced it at OSCON 2008. A lot has happened since that initial release. Among other things, NPR extended the original release with enhancements like our Station Finder API, Mix Your Own Podcast and Full Transcript API. We also added great new content, including Fresh Air, StoryCorps and extending our MP3 repository by adding more than 150,000 new MP3 files to the API.

In addition to these enhancements, the API has made a lot of progress in reaching new audiences. A wide range of NPR stations are making more extensive use of the API, including WBUR's new site, Minnesota Public Radio's new site and North Country Public Radio, among others. Meanwhile, other users in the general public have created fantastic mashups including NPR Addict (for the iPhone), NPR Backstory, code wrappers in Ruby and Perl, as well as many other mashups and widgets.

Equally important to NPR is how we have taken advantage of the API. Not only are we using the API extensively with partnerships, it is the foundation of the new NPR web site. Moreover, we extended our content management tools to enable content producers to add API feeds to any story or aggregation page on the site without any developer intervention.

At OSCON 2009, two weeks ago, Adam presented these details as well as usage statistics, the future of the API and more. Here is a copy of the slides from that presentation:




Click here to view the presentation (requires Adobe Acrobat)

By Andy Carvin

Ever since the NPR API came out a year ago, we've toyed around with the idea of inviting local coders to NPR headquarters over pizza and beer to see what kinds of apps and mashups we could come up with together. It seemed like a fun idea, but we realized there was an opportunity for something even more powerful. What if we brought together all sorts of people interested in collaborating with public radio and public TV, to see what we could come up with, including digital tools, citizen journalism and other types community-centered initiatives?

As we talked with our colleagues across the public media system and beyond, it became clear we needed to host a really big camp - a national PublicMediaCamp, that is.

On the weekend of October 17th at American University's campus in Washington DC, NPR, PBS and the AU Center for Social Media will co-host a two-day event that we hope will serve as the kickoff for similar community collaboration events around the country. PublicMediaCamp is going to be organized as an unconference - an event without a rigid, top-down programmatic structure, with the sessions organized by the participants themselves. We're modeling it on other unconferences like Barcamp and Podcamp, which have successfully spawned similar volunteer-driven events around the world, as well as public media unconferences that have been hosted by Minnesota Public Radio and KUSP in Santa Cruz, CA.

All of these unconferences have one thing in common - giving all participants a chance to play a leadership role in the event's success, using tools like wikis and Twitter to plan the event. (Our Twitter hashtag is going to be #PubCamp, to keep it nice and brief.) And that's why we're modeling this event on unconferences. Public broadcasters are well-established pillars within their communities that have inspired a special bond with the public surrounding them. We've been very successful at organizing financial capital campaigns - particularly in the form of pledge drives - but there's still a lot more we can do when it comes to organizing social capital campaigns, in which local volunteers team up with public broadcasters because they've got specific skill sets that can strengthen stations and the community at large. And the only way we can explore the possibilities is to talk to each other, brainstorm and build things together.

Continue reading "PublicMediaCamp: Strengthening Public Broadcasting Through Community Collaboration" >

by Adam J Martin

Along with the relaunch of our Web site last week, we've also made important changes to the NPR Media Player. The first thing you'll notice about the new player is its redesigned 'skin' that takes advantage of the cleaner layout found throughout the new npr.org. We hope this makes it easier for you to navigate the new features of the player and creates a more seamless experience with the website.

The next thing you'll notice is an enhanced listening and viewing experience. The new player was rebuilt to load faster, require less processing power and use less bandwidth than the previous version, which makes it faster to go from clicking a link to enjoying listening or watching a story.

We've added new features that make it easier to share your favorite stories as well. You've always been able to e-mail a story or send a link from the player but now for many stories, you can use the ↓ download button to save audio you haven 't listened to or want to listen to again on your MP3 player. Also, we've added an <> embed button that allows you to copy the media player code and post an embeddable version of it on your blog or Web site. It's the easiest way ever to show off your favorite NPR stories. We hope you'll find the new embeddable player a fun way to enjoy and discover NPR across the Web wherever you are.

Here's an example of the embedded player, using a Fresh Air story from earlier this summer:

Continue reading "The NPR Media Player: Better, Stronger, Faster - And Embeddable" >

By Daniel Jacobson and Robert Spier

A few weeks ago, Symbian announced their new Horizon publishing program designed to enable and assist developers in building applications for mobile devices that run Symbian software. Horizon will be going live in October and NPR is excited to be one of the launch organizations.

NPR story page on Symbian's Horizon platform.( NPR (c) 2009)

This is exciting for NPR for a variety of reasons. First, we consider mobile to be a very important part of our ongoing Digital Media strategy and Symbian enjoys a very large (about 50%) marketshare among all smart phones worldwide. As our mobile presence matures, reaching this audience will help us fulfill our public service mission of informing and educating our audience. Speaking of public service missions, this partnership is also the convergence of two non-profit organizations focused on serving our audiences. As a result, our primary interests are to build a comprehensive platform that will engage the develop community, provide rich experiences for consumers and maintain openness while doing so.

The primary output of this partnership will be a fully-functional app, available to Symbian device owners through Horizon. This app, currently under development, will offer NPR audio and full text content and will take advantage of some of Symbian's unique features. One such feature that we are thrilled about is the ability for audio from our app to be backgrounded, which means that you can use other apps on the device while still listening to NPR.

Another joint goal of this partnership is to have all code open sourced and made available to the community for development. NPR wants to become more active in the open-source arena, and we are fortunate to have Symbian as a partner at this time .

NPR stations on Symbian's Horizon platform.( NPR (c) 2009)

The development of this app is being done by Symsource, who built the first functioning version of the NPR app that was part of the July demo. This work is compelling for three reasons. First, the app is completely running off of our API's and takes advantage of the full text and audio assets available in it, as well as the extensive station information. Second, the development was done very quickly, which suggests that ongoing development by the open source community could yield interesting results. Finally , Symsource developed a single app which was demoed on three major devices, including the Nokia N5800, Nokia N97, and the Samsung 8910. This is also great news for developers because apps built on Horizon will work across the suite of Symbian devices with no additional code necessary (there are some exceptions to this, but that is generally the case).

NPR is continuing to work with Symbian and Symsource to prepare the NPR app, and the corresponding codebase, for release. Horizon and our app will be publicly announced in London at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition 2009 (SEE2009) on October 27th and 28th.
We look forward to seeing our app and to the continued discussion with the open source community in the coming months. And thanks to Symbian for including us in this exciting venture!